'iPhone is much more powerful than a Wii'

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Alleged Telltale Games staff member opens extraordinary criticisms on forum

An interface developer at US dev Telltale Games has publicly claimed he believes the iPhone to be more powerful than Nintendo’s Wii.

Telltale Games has finished developing new Monkey Island episodic content for both the PC and Wii, sold via digital platforms Steam and Wii Ware. The group was not responsible for the iPhone remake of the original Monkey Island game, which was released contemporaneously.

Nevertheless, a developer on the official TellTale forums claims that “the Wii and DS are extremely underpowered and their popularity doesn't remove the hardware limitations."

Contained within the same thread are a number of complaints surrounding apparent framerate and quality issues on the Wii Monkey Island game.

"The voices and textures are the way they are because we're limited to 40 megs for WiiWare titles. The PC versions of our games are usually 150+ megs, and most modern games range anywhere from one to ten gigabytes or more. Talk to Nintendo about this one.”

The developer, given the pseudonym Yare, said that the “frame rate issues will probably get sorted out eventually, but keep in mind that the Wii is just not a powerful console. An iPhone is much more powerful than a Wii, even."

Yare introduced himself to the forums back in March as “the engineer responsible for the controls” on Telltale’s Wallace and Gromit episodic games.

Elsewhere in the thread he defended his comments, claiming that it wasn't his intent to “blame” the platform for its technical performance.

“I just thought some people might be interested in an explanation of how game development works, why the Wii version has lower quality voice, higher compression, and so on,” he said.